a field guide · business division
In 2003 a linguist wrote about a woman who had spelled acorn as egg corn. It was not a typo. She had heard the word, never seen it written, and reasoned her way to something sensible: a seed, shaped like an egg, from a family of things called corn. Geoffrey Pullum proposed that the category needed a name, and that it should be named after its own best specimen.
An eggcorn is a mishearing that makes sense. That is the entire test. A malapropism is simply wrong and produces nonsense. A mondegreen is a misheard song lyric. An eggcorn is a repair — somebody met a word they did not know, substituted one they did, and landed somewhere that still works. Old-timers' disease is a better theory of Alzheimer's than most people could construct on short notice.
Offices are full of them, and the reason is structural rather than intellectual. Business English runs almost entirely on idioms inherited from trades that no longer exist. Sailing. Horsemanship. Stretching wet wool on frames. Poker. Medieval taxation. Roman military punishment. Nobody has met a tenter in a century, and no one in your Tuesday stand-up has ever shooed a horse. When the last person who knows what a word meant stops using it, the phrase is defenseless, and the people who inherit it repair it toward whatever still makes sense to them.
So this is not a list of things stupid people say. Several entries below are repairs that already won: straight and narrow was strait until quite recently, and scapegoat is itself a worn-down contraction of escape goat. The corrections in this guide are correct only until enough people disagree with them. That is how all of this has always worked.
None of this is settled. Usage has free rein, dictionaries follow along behind it, and the corrections here are accurate for now — which is, for all intents and purposes, the strongest claim any usage guide can make.
Entries marked ✱ were collected on these premises.